Getting customers in the door is a challenge that all entrepreneurs face. But even if you've been successful with one business model to date, targeting a new customer base—whether through expansion or a new venture—can feel like starting all over again.

To save you time and money, I asked several YEC entrepreneurs what one thing they'd prioritize above everything else when expanding an existing model to target a new customer base. Their best answers are below.

Customer Feedback

When expanding your existing model, it is imperative that you intensely and actively listen to your new customer base. Things that you might have assumed as a constant when moving into the field may not be.

It is essential in the first few days and months you are asking questions in as many ways and forms that you can to gather all potential feedback. Analyzing this feedback and adjusting your position quickly will help minimize glitches and potholes that you may have fallen into had you not been a vigilant listener.

Overlooking your end user, whether B2B or B2C, is the mistake that will come back to hurt you in hours spent, dollars wasted, or misdirected effort down the road.

Potential Partnerships

Before I step into another customer base, I do my research. I first look to my own partnerships and affiliations and try to determine if I know anyone who has experience in that direct customer base, and then I either call, email or ask them to lunch. I want to get every detail of their experience from the good and the bad.

That becomes my biggest learning tool to plan my strategy. From there, if I have partnerships that bridge the gap between my old and new customer base, I try to make that publicly apparent.

I believe customers enjoy this kind of synchronicity, and it's almost as if their favorite brands are humanized to them and are "friends" for lack of a better word. If they already believe in your peer's product, they'll trust their word in recommending yours.

Review Site Research

Make sure you do appropriate market research. Check Amazon or similar sites that list your product category to see what people are saying about products that are already in the industry, the problems/issues they have with those products, and what they like.

Also, check to see whether people are actually purchasing the product. Amazon and/or Yelp reviews are a great place to do this kind of market research.

The Competition

You should never overlook your competitors and the total addressable market size. It’s critical to understand how strong your competitors are—what they’re doing well, what they’re not doing well, how you can differentiate yourself and how big the market is. You should never assume that you’re going to be dramatically bigger than the current market leader.

Your Current Clients

The current users/customers of your product have already instilled their trust in your brand. Make sure to not alienate them during this change because they are the customers you have already worked to create. While you are expanding, be sure to not isolate your original business model.

Potential Rebranding

When it comes to expanding your existing model to a new customer base, be open to the idea that you may need to rework your branding to best message your new audience. It can be a challenge as an organization to change your aesthetic identity or tone, but sometimes it is an important change to make in order to succeed in a new market.

As you go through the process of evaluating whether you need to adjust your existing brand, make sure to conduct interviews with your new target market customers so that you have a holistic understanding of their needs and preferences. This will help you make critical branding decisions as you expand successfully.

Redefining The Need

You have to spend more time and effort reaching a new customer base than you do reaching your current customer base. People often think that it’s a simple matter of changing their marketing to target a new group, but they often forget that the effort needed to reach their initial market was huge.

Think of the first marketing you did to get your business launched. It isn’t going to take as much effort as that because you probably have some brand recognition already. However, you’re still going to have to define the need for your product all over again.

Perspective From Other Fields

The typical approach to market research is simply looking at customer trends in your field and asking your existing customers about what they’d like to see next. Instead of pigeonholing yourself, try to gain perspective by reading about or getting exposed to other companies outside your field. Learn from their experiences in targeting new customer bases and innovate solutions from there.

Thorough Market Analysis

You need to determine whether there is truly a need by conducting a thorough market study and gathering data. You should not make this determination based on a gut feeling.

A market study can uncover specific challenges you might face, so you can anticipate those and shape your product and campaigns appropriately. A market study should identify competitors and explore why they are not fully meeting the needs of customers. You can use this information to come up with a plan to distinguish your business from the competition.

Strategic Messaging

Make sure you are purposeful with your messaging about how this new product or vertical will weave in with your existing products. Whether you want it to be totally separate or integrated somehow with your existing product or service, there needs to be purpose around that messaging.

Expanding with a new product provides you with an opportunity to excite existing customers about your growth trajectory and ability to innovate. However, if not positioned properly, your approach could be perceived as scattered, or as if your other products aren’t working.

Changes In Sales And Service

Don’t overlook the challenges associated with pivoting a sales force and customer service team. You’ve hired specific people and trained them to sell to and work with a certain customer base. If you’re changing the model, you should consider that, in addition to updating your sales pitch, product differentiators and pricing to resonate with a new segment, you also may need to make adjustments to your sales and service recruiting strategies and training processes.

And the vast majority of businesses aren't using sophisticated software from Salesforce, Oracle, or Microsoft. They're stuck using email, contact managers, spreadsheets—maybe even paper and pencil.

Software For The 99%

It's not that no one's buying CRM software. Far from it. In June, Gartner upped its 2017 market forecast for customer-relationship management, or CRM, to $37 billion, up sharply from $21 billion this year. That would make CRM software the biggest corporate software market, larger even than enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Gartner's optimism is warranted. The way businesses connect to customers is changing at warp speed. The added dimensions of social media and big data offer rich data hooks to any customer database.

More importantly, the market is underpenetrated. IDC estimates that there are some 1.1 billion mobile workers globally, or 35% of the workforce, which implies a global workforce of 3.4 billion (PDF). Yet according to SugarCRM, one of many vendors making CRM tools, only 15 million people use any type of software designed to manage those relationships. That amounts to a workforce penetration of just 0.5%.

And there are more than 225 million global businesses, according to the venerable Dun & Bradstreet database. Virtually all of them have customers—otherwise they wouldn't have much of a business.

Yet Salesforce.com, widely considered a CRM leader, has an installed base of just 100,000 customers, according to Gartner Group. While that figure includes some of the world's largest corporations, it represents less than 0.004% of D&B's global commercial database. By the most optimistic numbers, less than 1% of the global workforce uses CRM tools.

Why We Haven't Automated Our Customer Relationships

One explanation for low use is that implementing a CRM system is a major challenge, particularly for smaller organizations that don't have dedicated IT team. Fact is, most CRM software is difficult to use, especially in the areas of system integration and reporting.

Forrester notes that about half of 556 large organizations it surveyed (PDF) have implemented a CRM solution for marketing, sales, or customer-service applications. An additional 23% plan to use a CRM solution within the next 12 to 24 months.

That means that even among large enterprises, the very market most CRM vendors target, the glass is half empty. ReadWrite summarized the failings of the CRM industry succinctly: In the span of 10 years, $75 billion was spent on CRM software, according to Gartner. But during that period, customer satisfaction rose just 3-5%.

Fast-moving market trends, however, may help reshape the CRM landscape. Forrester identifies three phenomena that are reinvigorating CRM:

Mobile—The U.S. has the highest percentage of mobile workers in its workforce, with 72% of the U.S. workforce being mobile as of 2008. Yet Forrester found that "despite the growing maturity of mobile CRM solutions, business and IT leaders remained perplexed by the complexities of the different mobile options and architectures."

Cloud—It should be no surprise that given the large influx of smartphone and tablet users, many of whom adhere to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend, cloud data syncing has become essential.

Social media—The influx of social-media-generated customer intelligence has resulted in a never-ending river of data, leading many organizations to show a growing interest in social media integration and big-data applications.

How are next-wave CRM tools tackling this potential opportunity? I looked at three relatively new contenders: Base CRM, Contactually, and Intuit's QuickBase. Each is trying to solve the complexity challenge in its own way.

Base CRM

Base CRM, which debuted as PipeJump, introduced an iPhone and Android app in January 2012, and relaunched its Web-based solution in late June. The company has received a total of $7.9 million in venture-capital funding.

A Base CRM enterprise solution starts at $15/mo., which includes no Base branding, unlimited deals and third-party integrations, like Dropbox and Mailchimp, plus 2GB storage. For $45/mo. per user, you also get sales goals and forecasting, plus task automation and 5GB of storage.

As Base CRM CEO Uzi Shmilovici tells me, the company is aware that CRM systems' lack of adoption is due to the fact that users face an "intense effort" to maintain their contact lists, so the company wants to reduce input by automating the process as much as possible. To enable that effort, Base has 90 employees today, with 71 focused on product development. Shmilovici says the company's development efforts have resulted in many positive reviews and top rankings in Google and Apple's app stores.

Base CRM certainly appears to have taken the lead in ease of use. The program boasts a number of nicely integrated features, including web calling, e-mail synchronization, plus sales pipeline and funnel analysis.

Another welcome feature is a Chrome extension that grabs LinkedIn contact information and adds it to your contact list.

Contactually

A different approach to easing contact entry comes from Contactually, a Web-based CRM application. It simplifies contact categorization by turning the chore into a quasi-entertaining "bucket game."

The program syncs with your IMAP email account, a nice feature that helps users build a contact list dynamically without having to import an address book (although it does that too). Another benefit of email syncing is that Contactually can "nag" you to recontact people you've been in touch with in the past.

Contactually also will find duplicate contacts that use different email addresses, allowing you to quickly merge them. But the best new feature may well be "Introductions," which makes introducing two people in your network quick and easy. In this day and age of high-octane networking, that's a big time-saver.

A Contactually Small Business account costs $40/mo. per user. Unfortunately, the Introductions feature is not available on the lower cost $20/mo. Premium plan.

Intuit QuickBase

While Base CRM and Contactually take a dynamic interface approach, Intuit's QuickBase goes in the opposite direction with a more traditional spreadsheet-like grid layout in every module of the application. QuickBase includes all the usual components, contact management, project management and sales management.

The design is pretty straightforward but its four top navigation menus can look quite intimidating at first. QuickBase also lacks special social-media features, dedicated import filters, and MailChimp integration. While there's no email synchronization, you can at least send emails from QuickBase, but that's a pretty basic function.

Unfortunately, QuickBase has a high cost of entry with pricing starting at $299/mo. for up to 10 users. QuickBase's conservative user interface is likely to appeal to people familiar with Salesforce.com, as the design metaphor is quite similar.

The Next Big Opportunity

There is no question that CRM tools are getting more adept at social networking while improving ease of use across all platforms. Yet I would still like to see a tighter integration, particularly with LinkedIn. Nimble, for example, lets users send messages directly to social media followers.

Given the massive opportunity of equipping millions of businesses with tools they need to better service customers, easier-to-use CRM applications will proliferate and that's a relationship any business or customer should welcome with open arms.

One of the big promises of social networking is that it will inject your networking skills with PED (performance enhancing data), able to give you the biggest network on the block. If you're a believer in the raw power of oh-so many social connections, that's OK. But if you're like me, you'll already hearing Janet Jackson's hit, What Have You Done For Me Lately? playing in your head.

The problem with most social media is that the quality of your network degenerates as it grows. At first, best friends and business connections are added. Only to be followed by many requests from friends with few benefits. That sentiment may be harsh but in this day and age of Time Compression, the greatest value of business networking lies in its ability to improve daily dealings.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you've already discovered, many of your "extremely well-connected" network contacts turn out to be, more often than not, less than stellar. So expect the next generation of social networks to devote a lot more attention to the purview of social capital.

Doing It The Analog Way

One company that provides a peek into the future of social networking is New York-based Relationship Science, a company founded by Neal Goldman, who reportedly raised the first $3 million of his $60 million investment in just three days.

Relationship Science has built the ultimate business Who's Who directory, relying on a staff of more than 800 people, located mostly in India. The data gathered over the past two years is derived strictly from publicly available information, Relationship Science CMO Josh Mait tells me.

What sets the company apart from most online directories is its interface. As Mait describes it, Relationship Science offers "institutional grade data in a consumer-friendly interface."

To use the data effectively you need to identify people you know well. Once your relationships are tagged, the system will show your total number of first-degree connections, which in Mait's case was about 18,000 connections produced by just 50 tagged relationships.

Relationship Science has cataloged millions of people and organized their affinities, connections and special interests in the ultimate networking directory, also conveniently available via iPad, as this image demonstrates.

Finding A Path

One of the most powerful features of Relationship Science is Path Finder, which lets you visually see how you're connected to someone else, say for example, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Relationship links are color-coded as either strong, average or weak.

These relationships are based on many data elements, including education, memberships, interests, affiliations, career, boards, committees, non-profit donations, public holdings, awards and events. Anyone in sales will really appreciate this level of data granularity, all delivered in a simple interface.

Mait adds, "Our investors invested in the product because they saw themselves in it, networking is how they became successful." I truly believe that social networks like Linked In could learn from Relationship Science, although the company vigorously denies that it's a social network or a "traditional CRM system."

I predict that a lot of social innovation will come in the area of superior connection building. The watchword of the future being "social capital." People who blow other people off without communication will in the very near future be anonymously rated by their social media peers.

And those ratings will pop up in social capital databases that everyone will tap into. We can't wait to see how this futuristic science of relationships helps us all perform better. Until then, I suggest you spend $3,000 a year on Relationship Science. There's no better way to get to Howard Schultz.

Images via Relationship Science.

Editors Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted the cost of the Relationship Science service as $3000/month. It is actually $3000/year, and the article has been updated to reflect that amount.

Sure, cybercrime headlines go to multinational conglomerates that are breached by determined, sophisticated criminals. But small firms get hit more often, a fact that no doubt surprises their owners and customers.

Mom-and-pops often take fewer precautions, and when their customers also let down their guard, they all become easy prey. It might be more time-consuming to string together access to a lot of small businesses, but the prize – fat consumer financial accounts – is just as valuable as any stolen from big firms.

Security Polices Are Lacking

A recent survey of more than 1,000 businesses with less than 250 employees shows that nine in 10 have no formal policies guiding employees on how to avoid malicious sites that download malware. Commissioned by the National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec, the poll also found that more than seven in 10 respondents have no guidelines for using Facebook, Twitter and other social media where cybercriminals will hijack accounts to distribute malicious links.

Privacy polices were also lacking. The survey found that 60% of the businesses had no guidelines for employees to follow regarding customer or employee information.

The Security Risks Are Obvious

Fully 73% said using the Internet safely was critical to their business, and 46% acknowledged it was very critical. In fact, nearly nine in 10 had one or more employees using the Internet for daily operations, with seven in 10 saying they were either somewhat or very dependent on the Internet for running their company.

Nevertheless, nearly 60% of the businesses had no contingency for handling a loss of customer or employee data, credit or debit numbers or intellectual property. Yet, nearly seven in 10 manage their own sites in-house, meaning if there's trouble, the small business is liable.

Size Doesn't Matter

So why the disconnect? Michael Kaiser, executive director of security alliance, said small businesses believe hackers are more interested in breaking into large companies that would seem to have much more valuable information.

"They may think their size protects them," Kaiser said.

What many small businesses don't realize is that hackers value information no matter the size of the company. They want names and passwords of employees' email accounts in order to identify customers and send them malware or links to malicious sites.

Small businesses “may not understand how the cybercriminal system works," he said. "A list of 200 customers may be incredibly valuable."

Of course, not all small businesses operate the same way. Those working with defense and financial firms are used to tighter security requirements, for example. More small businesses will have to upgrade to similar levels.

The Easy Pickings

Software powering electronic cash registers is a popular target. Last December, four Romanians were indicted in U.S. federal court for allegedly stealing credit-, debit- and gift-card numbers from the point-of-sale systems at 150 Subway restaurants and more than 50 other franchise and small retailers. The suspects were accused of charging millions of dollars to the accounts of 80,000 customers.

"A small business is a target that doesn't necessarily have any better security than my mom and dad," Wisniewski said.

Weak security by small businesses accounts for 90% of the payment data breaches reported to Visa. A study by Verizon found that nearly three-quarters of data breaches in 2011 involved businesses with fewer than 100 employees.

Share As Little Data As Possible

Put all the facts together and a person would be wise to share as little personal information as possible with a small business.

All business owners should consider the case of hotelier Wyndham Worldwide. It was sued this year by the Federal Trade Commission for failing to have adequate security to prevent the theft of payment card information of hundreds of thousands of customers.

There’s nothing to say a small firm can’t be victimized and then sued.